“At War With the Mystics” is the first outwardly political album from the Flaming Lips. But instead of curbing the band’s psychedelic creativity, it has simply redirected it.

The album’s concept is premised on a fantastical creation myth. Hoping to enlighten the Bush administration, a band of paranoid hippies have replaced the deodorizers in the White House urinals with pucks of LSD and ecstasy so that the drugs will splash up onto anyone who pees on them. But the plan backfires: Instead of mellowing the president’s men, the drugs freak them out. President Bush and company misinterpret their psychedelic experiences as religious revelations – they feel themselves transformed from ordinary elected officials into mystics with a mandate from God.

This isn’t the first time the Flaming Lips have arrayed themselves against powerful, mysterious forces.Their 2002 album, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots,” was an anime fantasy about a teenage girl forced to take on an army of “evil-natured robots programmed to destroy us.” Like so many sci-fi fantasies, this one could easily be read (but I think, in this case, misread) as expressing anxiety about foreign invaders – particularly in the context of post-September 11 America. In fact, “Fight Test,” one of the singles from the album, sounds almost like an endorsement of the neo-con world view: “I thought I was smart / I thought I was right / I thought it better not to fight,” Wayne Coyne begins, only to conclude: “To fight is to defend / if not now tell me when / would be the time that you would stand up and be a man.”

“Mystics” dispels any doubts about where the Lips stand: They’re on the side of the urinal-tampering hippies. The album opens with “Yeah Yeah Yeah Song,” a ragtag number that could easily belong to freak folkies Animal Collective. Amid repetitive chanting, hand claps, acoustic-guitar strumming, vocoder moans, and knob twiddling, Coyne poses a series of philosophical questions: “If you could blow up the world with a flick of a switch, would you do it? / If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich, would you do it?” It’s a critique of those currently in power, but also of the impulses for power in all of us.

While critical of the Bush administration, the Flaming Lips offer no comfort to its enemies. On “Free Radicals” (a song inspired by a dream about Devendra Banhart), over music that sounds like a cross between Prince’s falsetto funk and Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll,” Coyne tries to dissuade a suicide bomber from carrying out his mission. “You think you’re radical, but you’re not so radical,” he sings.”In fact, you’re fanatical.” He then goes on to compare an unnamed terrorist – Osama bin Laden, presumably – to “a poor man’s Donald Trump.”

“Mystics” isn’t only a political album, however. For Coyne and company, the metaphysical always lies just behind earthbound concerns. “My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion” (you gotta love these song titles) is a Vangelis-like wash of astral church organs and twittering bird sounds – the perfect backdrop for a Coyne homily on death, rebirth, and narrow-mindedness.

“Vein of Stars” reiterates the optimistic nihilism first expressed on “Do You Realize?” from the last album. “Who knows, maybe there isn’t a vein of stars calling out my name,” Coyne sings. “Maybe it’s just as well, cause if there ain’t no heaven,maybe there ain’t no hell.”

On “The Sound of Failure,” the Flaming Lips take on another regime of sorts: that of Britney Spears and Gwen Stefani. The song preaches the limited usefulness of superficial music, but stops short of condemning them: “Go tell Britney and go tell Gwen / I’m not trying to go against them.” Coyne’s hesitancy may stem from the fact that Stefani makes one hell of a muse. Coyne found inspiration for the song “It Overtakes Me” by imagining that he was writing it for her. The result is a hybrid of the two artists’ styles: a bubblegum funk song about the perilousness of the Earth hurtling through infinite space.

But the most commercial moment on “Mystics” is a song called “The W.A.N.D.” (the acronym stands for “the will always negates defeat”). It’s where the protest storyline comes together, and falls apart.

“Time after time those fanatical minds try to rule the world / telling us all it’s them who’s in charge of it all,” Coyne sings. But his heart isn’t really in it.The song is a riff on anthems like John Lennon’s “Power to the People” and Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power.” Unlike these songs of triumphalist populism, this one isn’t prescriptive. Coyne’s answer isn’t more democracy, it’s “a trick, a magic stick that will make them all fall.” In a way, it’s a fitting end: An album that began with a political fantasy also ends with one.

The Flaming Lips play Friday and Saturday at Webster Hall (125 E. 11th Street, 212-388-0300).